This weekend the liturgical readings remind us to be grateful and thankful to God for all that we receive from him and through him. Every Holy Mass is an Act of Thanksgiving.

At every Mass we are called to grow in the spirit of thanksgiving, because the Eucharist is Jesus’ own prayer of Thanksgiving to the Father. The Greek word –eucharita, from which the word “Eucharist” is derived, means “thanksgiving.” During the Mass in the Eucharistic Prayer, the priest says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.” Everyone responds, “It is right and just.” And then the priest replies with a saying of great theological depth: “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, Holy Father, almighty and ever-living God.” It’s right, it’s just, it’s fitting, it’s appropriate for us to give God thanks, “always and everywhere.”

Before Jesus said the words of consecration on the night he was betrayed, the vigil of his crucifixion, he took bread and, as we’ll hear anew today, “gave thanks.” He gave thanks, because it is right always and everywhere, our duty and our salvation, to do so. He gave thanks because he was constantly thanking the Father. He gave thanks because he knew that the Father would bring the greatest good out of the evil of all time. He gave thanks because it would be through his passion, death, and resurrection, that Jesus would institute the means by which we would be able to enter into his own relationship with the Father.

The Mass is the school in which we participate in Jesus’ own thanksgiving, the thanksgiving the Church makes continuously from the rising of the sun to its setting. Let us participate in the Holy Mass with a heart that is full of Gratitude and Thanksgiving.